Helen
Tangires, A&S '78, recalls getting to work each day at the
Blue Top Diner before 5 in the morning. The Blue Top was at
Boston Street and Montford Avenue in Baltimore, maybe 100
yards from the harbor waterfront. It had 10 stools and a
tall sign topped by a mustachioed gent in a chef's toque
making the OK sign with his left hand. Tangires' father,
Bill Tangires, owned the place. He also owned 21 lunch
wagons, Chevy step vans that purveyed breakfast and lunch
to workers all over the city. Helen began working on the
wagons in the early 1970s when she was 16, and two years
later she got her own route. The wagons were full kitchens
on wheels with grills, coffee urns, steam tables, coolers,
and provisions on board. Tangires remembers the pre-dawn
routine at the diner: "We'd ice up the truck, make coffee,
get the grill hot, and get all the food and sodas onto the
truck. Our first stop would be, like, 5 in the morning. I
was a short-order cook. If you wanted a fried-egg sandwich,
I fried the egg right there on the truck." She would slide
some of those eggs over grilled Polish sausages and serve
them with 16-ounce pineapple sodas — breakfast for
hungry men at construction sites.

Construction provided plenty of trade. In the mid-1950s,
Tangires' father fed workers building the Baltimore Harbor
Tunnel. She remembers working the site of the massive post
office at Fayette Street. Another stop was the excavation
for the National Aquarium. One summer, her route took her
to the Baltimore shipyards. "It's really an unusual
experience to pull a lunch wagon up to a dock where there's
a huge container ship unloading. I liked it because you
were in the shade of the ship." A lunch wagon was hot work.
"It had to be every bit of 100 degrees in there."

In 1978, Tangires graduated from Johns Hopkins with a
degree in art
history and went to work for the Cloisters Children's
Museum in Brooklandville, Maryland. But she never got the
food service business out of her system. In the mid-1980s,
by that time living in Texas with her husband, Dennis
McDaniel, she kept in touch with relatives by gathering
family history. "With so many Greek relatives in the
restaurant business and related trades, a business history
emerged from their stories," she says. "So I decided to
write a history of the lunch wagon business." That history
appeared in the Journal of American Culture, and
for Tangires it was just the beginning. Her exploration of
the historical literature pulled her into deeper reading
about how cities feed their residents, and somewhere along
the way, she became a self-confessed nut about public food
markets. The architecture of market houses fascinated her.
So did early American ordinances that mandated those
facilities and regulated the commerce conducted there.
Eighteenth-century local governments thought municipal food
markets were important. By the middle of the next century,
they were changing their minds. Why? The deeper Tangires
probed, the more her interest in the subject grew.

Nearly 20 years later, she has written two books on the
history of American food markets, with a third in progress.
In 2003, she published Public Markets and Civic Culture
in Nineteenth-Century America (Johns Hopkins University
Press). This year, the Library of Congress brought out
Public Markets (Norton/Library of Congress), a
collection of historical photographs with text by Tangires.
She's researching a follow-up to her first book that will
examine markets and the rise of food wholesaling in the
20th century.

To her, markets are more than just a place for city
residents to buy food. They are part of a community's moral
economy. In cities where chain grocery stores have left the
urban core for the suburbs, markets give city residents
access to fresh food, and they help sustain local farmers.
Markets are democratic spaces where people from all walks
of life mingle, air their grievances, and enjoy what they
have in common. "There are always going to be new forms of
private food retailing," Tangires says. "But it's important
to sustain these [public] places."

Late on a
Friday morning in May, Baltimore's Lexington Market
bustles. Vendors have worked this site since 1782. For its
first 20 years it was just an open area where on market day
farmers parked wagons laden with produce to sell. Now it's
housed in a huge building at Paca and Lexington streets,
and a smaller adjacent structure called the West Market.
Six days a week, every manner of Baltimorean walks the
floor and ponders every manner of comestible. Here is the
Buttercup Bakery, Angie's Soul Food, and Sandwich King.
Over there is Han's Produce, Garden Produce, and Lefty's
Produce. Harbor City Deli, Sheppard's Deli, Station Deli,
Mother's Deli. Little Texas, Polock Johnny's, Ichi Ban
Yaki, Mt. Olympus Gyros, and Italian Stallion.
Mediterranean food at Pandora's Box, chitlins and hog maws
at Amos Meats, cheese danish at Muhly's, smoked jowls and
pig tails at Buffalo Bill's II.

Markets
are democratic spaces where
people
from all walks of life
mingle, air their
grievances, and
enjoy what they have in
common.

The centerpiece of Lexington Market is Faidley's Seafood.
Lake trout, tilapia, butterfish, catfish, rockfish,
steakfish, split shad, shad roe, frog's legs, hardheads,
sea bass, bluefish, blue crabs, white perch, orange roughy,
rainbow trout. Bill Devine has worked here for 50 years.
"Showed up here on a blind date," Devine says. Then he
adds, deadpan, "I sleep with Nancy Faidley." Nancy is the
fifth generation Faidley to run the place, and she was the
blind date, now Devine's wife. After a stint in the Navy,
Devine joined the business and seems to enjoy talking about
it. He shows off a display of press clippings about the
company, explains that "steakfish" is actually hake, and
complains that the market for raccoon — not exactly
seafood but nevertheless for sale at Faidley's for $19.95
each, two for $39 — keeps shrinking. "People on the
Eastern Shore eat them. Always did. Still do. But the sales
of muskrat and raccoon each year dwindle because those
people are dying off."

Faidley's does a brisk lunch business, and Tangires orders
a fried steakfish-that's-really-hake sandwich and agrees to
share a can of National Bohemian beer. She likes Lexington
Market. The wet bricks and pavement, the smell of propane
from the fry tanks, the give-and-take of commerce all
remind her of her family's diner and lunch wagons. She
enjoys reading the signs, checking the prices, noting
what's for sale that tells her she's in Baltimore —
you don't find Polock Johnny's Polish sausages anywhere
else — and getting a feel for how the city is doing.
She says, "If I see a market that seems to be well run,
thriving, crowded, organized, and well supplied, that says
something to me about the larger environment of the
city."

Tangires and her husband came back east to Washington in
1987 when she was hired by the National Gallery of Art's
Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, where she is
currently an administrator. Across the street from the
National Gallery is the National Archives, which had been
built on the site of the old Center Market. In the 1870s,
Center Market was one of the largest public food markets in
the country, more than 50,000 square feet. Tangires became
interested in its history. She combed the visual and
textual records of the U.S. Department of Agriculture at
the Archives. The more she found, the more her interest
grew, and finally she enrolled in the American studies
doctoral program at George Washington University. For the
subject of her PhD dissertation, she chose 19th-century
American markets, and that research became the core of her
first book.

Joseph Severio (at right in photo) sold peanuts in
Wilmington, Delaware, in the early 1900s.
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division.

She learned that for cities and towns in colonial America,
markets were a municipal responsibility. "In addition to
building wharves, docks, bridges, and roads, local
government was expected to provide facilities for buying
and selling food," she wrote in Public Markets and Civic
Culture. "These facilities were more than a mere
convenience; it was the duty of the state to ensure that
the urban populace would have an adequate, wholesome, and
affordable supply of necessities."

Eighteenth-century city planners placed market sheds, or
simply designated open-air market space, in town squares or
the middle of thoroughfares. They chose land already
publicly owned and accessible by road or water. Often they
used marshy ground, if there was any, because it was not
valued by investors or developers and was ideal as a place
to dump waste. Sometimes civic-minded, or profit-minded,
individuals provided land. Baltimore's Lexington Market
bills itself as "the world's largest continuously running
market for more than six generations" on land donated by
John Eager Howard, a Revolutionary War hero, "on his return
from the war." Tangires found a 1952 master's thesis by a
Penn State student, David Osborne, that proved Howard
actually had leased the land to the city in 1804 for an
annual payment of $228 in gold and silver. The city paid
Howard and his heirs for 99 years.

Municipal authorities passed market ordinances designed to
maintain a fair, orderly, hygienic system for vending food
to the public. Farmers were not allowed to sell anywhere
else in the city. The government set hours of operation,
assigned stalls, regulated weights and measures, inspected
meat and poultry for spoilage, imposed and collected fines,
and guarded against illicit activities such as forestalling
(buying goods before they could reach the open market),
regrating (buying goods with intent to resell), or
engrossing (hoarding goods to create artificial scarcity).
Customers were regulated, too. Market laws prohibited
drunken behavior or loitering. An 1835 ordinance in St.
Louis forbade "drunk [sic], fighting, quarreling, reviling,
threatening, swearing, blackguarding, pilfering, stealing,
robbing, cheating, swindling, or disturbing the good
people."

A pushcart market on Mulberry Street in New York City,
circa 1900.
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division.

Farmers brought their produce to market by road. Fishermen
preferred to come in by water. Near Washington's Center
Market, fishmongers kept their catches swimming in special
tanks floating on the canal. Livestock and even some
poultry walked to market, urged on by drovers. In the
autumn of 1810, drovers guided an estimated 40,000 pigs
from Ohio to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other eastern
cities. One young drover in 1828 somehow managed to walk a
thousand turkeys from Petersburg, Ohio, to Pittsburgh, a
distance of more than 50 miles. Turkey drovers would first
walk their birds through warm asphalt to coat their feet
— turkey shoes.

As cities grew in the early 19th century, they erected
bigger market houses. Boston built Faneuil Hall with $1
million in public funds, the equivalent of more than $18
million today. St. Louis built Union Market, Philadelphia
built Reading Market, New York built Washington Market and
Tompkins Market and Fulton Fish Market. By the mid-1800s,
public markets were ubiquitous, centers not just of trade
but of politics and civic discourse. They were where
country people mixed with city people, races and
nationalities met over commerce, and a new urban population
found sustenance.

In Public Markets and Civic Culture, Tangires
describes how starting around 1840 cities began to question
whether they should be in the food retailing business. From
colonial times, few had disputed city government's role in
providing and regulating food markets. But mid-19th century
laissez-faire ideology began to influence governments in
the United States and European cities. Says Tangires, "The
coming of the railroads plays a role, too. They move food
around, and once you start moving food in a different way,
then the normal channels of distribution are challenged. As
cities grew, I think they began to ask whether space and
public resources should go into expanding the market
system, or would those resources be better spent on other
kinds of amenities? Cities still built bridges. They still
built roads. But they began to think maybe they didn't need
to spend all this money building these places because we
could best leave that to private enterprise."

Markets continued to function in some cities, but the
supermarket became the retailer-of-choice in America.
Washington tore down Center Market in 1931. Other cities
did the same, or turned their markets over to private
owners. Government stayed involved in food distribution by
beginning to build and operate massive regional food
wholesale centers, but those were state and federal
operations. Municipalities had lost their enthusiasm for
vending produce, steakfish, and hog maws.

Many cities
— including Atlanta, Seattle, and New Orleans —
continue to support city-wide public market systems.
Others, like Little Rock, Arkansas; Toledo, Ohio; and
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have developed new market facilities.
But the burgeoning market movement throughout the country
is farmers' markets. Gus Schumacher, an advocate of
farmers' markets, used to be undersecretary for farm and
foreign agriculture service at the U.S. Department of
Agriculture. He says that 25 years ago, there were about
350 farmers' markets in the United States. Now there are
more than 4,500, with more popping up each week.

"The whole
healthy food movement
has a lot going
against
it. When was the last time you saw a
billboard
promoting
fresh kale?"

In many communities, the drive wheels have been nonprofit
institutions like the Interfaith Hunger Coalition in Los
Angeles and the Southside Community Land Trust in
Providence, Rhode Island. Universities, including Duke,
Harvard, Syracuse, and Brown, have begun hosting markets on
their campuses, in several cases as part of their food
services operations. (Hopkins students at the Homewood
campus frequent the 32nd Street Market in the nearby
neighborhood of Waverley.) Freshfarms Markets, a nonprofit
based in Washington, D.C., has organized eight markets in
Washington, Annapolis, and Baltimore. Freshfarms
co-director Ann Yonkers says, "I think we've left food
production to the 'professionals' and wound up with an
industrialized system that does not serve us particularly
well. There's an abundance of food, but a lot of what's
important to human beings has been lost, such as flavor and
freshness. We've lost a connection to farmers and a sense
of place and community. We rediscover these at farmers'
markets."

David K. O'Neil, an international market consultant for the
Project for Public Spaces, observes, "A market is a form of
creating energy, all those little moments, those little
flashes of silver and gold in a market in the hand-to-hand
economy. You can shop anywhere today. You can stay at home
and shop on the Internet. But the old-fashioned marketplace
is more satisfying. We're always looking for life. There's
life in the market, and it's our life."

The ideals behind farmers' markets vary. Public health
advocates want to get more fresh produce on to the dinner
plates of the tens of millions of Americans who are obese,
hypertensive, and diabetic. (The health-care organization
Kaiser Permanente now sponsors more than 25 farmers'
markets in six states.) Urban activists want inner-city
residents, especially in poorer neighborhoods, to have
access to affordable, wholesome food. Communitarians want
to foster a greater sense of community life, and sustain
local farms and independent merchants. Environmentalists
want to promote alternatives to environmentally destructive
factory farming and a food system that consumes vast
quantities of fossil fuels to stock grocery stores on the
East Coast with produce grown on the West Coast or New
Zealand or Chile.

On the consumer side, farmers' markets are supported by
shoppers who want fresh, seasonal, locally produced food.
They are concerned with good nutrition, good flavor, and
food safety. They want to know where their tomatoes or
spinach or eggs came from. That's no guarantee of safety
from E. coli or Salmonella, but O'Neil says,
"at least people like the accountability and directness of
the local market option."

Finally, farmers like neighborhood markets because they can
sell directly to their customers and eliminate the
middleman. Schumacher points out how much better a farmer
can do selling at a local market. "For a Maryland grower to
sell wholesale, he might get $10 for a box of apples. Go to
a farmers' market and he'll get $60. He may wait 30 days or
more to get his money from a supermarket. At a farmers'
market he gets cash. It's a no-brainer."

Advocates argue that farmers' markets benefit everyone
involved. O'Neil says, "If you want to start a business,
the start-up costs in a market are really affordable. You
just need a good idea and a product, and you can rent a
stall in a market on a temporary basis to get something
going. That opens a huge door in cities for a whole new
class of entrepreneurs." A 2003 Ford Foundation study,
Public Markets as a Vehicle for Social Integration and
Upward Mobility, noted that 83 percent of the vendors
it surveyed had been able to start up their market
operations for less than $1,000.

Nevertheless, ideals sometimes collide with behavioral and
economic realities. Many markets in urban neighborhoods
don't make it. The Ford Foundation study notes, "Southland
Farmers' Market Association in Los Angeles found that 30
percent of new farmers' markets failed in California, and
those established in low-income areas were even more likely
to fail. They also found great disparity in gross revenues
in markets in low-income communities versus middle-income
communities: a South Central LA market grosses $200,000 a
year (and declining) compared with over $3.7 million (and
increasing) in Santa Monica." Furthermore, providing access
to nutritious food does not guarantee that the people who
need it most will buy it. O'Neil says, "The market
movement, for the most part, has been rooted in
well-educated, better-income areas and has not done nearly
as good a job at penetrating lower income, at-risk
neighborhoods."

City governments are not always enthusiastic partners, says
Schumacher. "The community testifies before local
government and says, 'We want a farmers' market,' and then
local government gets grouchy and says, 'All right, OK,
maybe. What about clean-up? Traffic? Police details?' Every
one is a battle. You may recall, 20 years ago the
McDonald's business mantra was to have a McDonald's within
20 minutes of every child in America. Do you see cities
putting a farmers' market within 20 minutes of every child?
I don't think so."

Tangires' grandfather built Jim's Lunch from old
crates.
Photo courtesy National Archives.

Tangires shies from entering the conversation about fresh
food markets and American dietary habits. As a scholar,
she's careful about making comments outside her area of
expertise; she's much more comfortable talking about the
architecture of 19th-century market houses than the
expanding waistlines of 21st-century Americans. She
endorses providing city residents with sources of fresh,
nutritious food within walking distance of wherever they
live, but acknowledges the power and reach of advertising
that steers the public toward the fast-food counter. "The
whole healthy food movement has a lot going against it in
our society," she says. "When was the last time you saw a
billboard promoting fresh kale?"

In June,
Tangires spent two weeks in southern Burgundy, living in a
house near the village of Uxeau in Sa˘ne-et-Loire. She has
been traveling to France for research purposes and pleasure
since 1991, and visits markets wherever she goes. On her
latest trip, Thursday was market day in Gueugnon, and the
market was busy. "People feel very committed to that kind
of shopping," she says. "When it's market day, everybody in
town seems to be there." She and her husband would go to
the market with their own carton for eggs, which are sold
in bulk, and a jar "because the roasted chicken guy for
free will give you as much of the juice off the chickens as
you want to take home for stock." There was always an
extraordinary selection of cheeses, and vendors selling not
just meats and produce but clothing and pocketbooks and the
oilcloth used to cover tables in France.

Tangires can succinctly tick off all the virtues that draw
her to markets, whether they be in Burgundy or Baltimore:
"Price. Quality. Quantity. Variety. Community." Plus, they
are in her blood. Baltimore's main market for fresh produce
used to be Center Market, near the corner of Harrison and
Baltimore streets. The land for it had to be dredged in the
1780s when it was first laid out, so it was popularly
called Marsh Market. There, around 1938, Tangires'
grandfather built a lunch stand from old crates under the
market's rear sheds. One day in the National Archives, she
found a photo taken near the Marsh Market and there, in the
background, was Jim's Lunch — her grandfather's
stand. Jim's depended on business from migrant laborers who
hung around the market looking for work. In the 1950s,
Baltimore passed an anti-loitering ordinance that, Tangires
says, chased away the migrant workers and put Jim's out of
business. She remembers her father telling him, "Pop, if
the customers can't come to us, we'll go to them," which
was the genesis of the family's lunch wagon business.

In the introduction to Public Markets and Civic
Culture, Tangires admits that when she began the book,
she assumed that like her grandfather's lunch stand, public
food markets had all but disappeared in the United States.
She was more than happy to learn that she was wrong. The
markets were out there, even making a comeback in some
cities. "It's such a practical system," she says. "I can
see it working in the 21st century as it has since
antiquity."